Senior Software Engineer

Onto Innovation•Wilmington, MA

About The Position

Onto Innovation is seeking a Software Engineer to join its Inspection Business Unit (IBU), developing software for complex semiconductor inspection platforms that integrate optics, motion, electronics, image acquisition, and software. The role requires maintaining a system-level understanding while investigating and solving problems at the level of individual subsystems, such as databases, algorithms, hardware, data flow, GPUs, and GUIs. Responsibilities are scoped to experience level: senior engineers take broader technical ownership and leadership, while early-career engineers focus on foundational work. The engineer will translate customer problems and application requirements into technical work, contribute to new product development with cross-functional teams, and apply machine learning, image processing, computer vision, mathematics, and optics to platform algorithms. Work may include optical imaging modeling and calibration, image segmentation, classification, and detection. The role includes software design, production development, testing, debugging, performance and scalability optimization, and design and code reviews. AI coding agents are used to accelerate implementation, while the engineer remains responsible for architecture, design integrity, and code quality. The role also involves keeping current with research and industry practices, documenting designs and system rationale, troubleshooting, and improving development workflows and tooling. Senior-level engineers provide technical mentorship, particularly in systems thinking. International travel to customer sites is required at least 20% of the time, with additional travel as business needs require.

Requirements

PhD, MS, or bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or a related field.
Related experience requirements are 0+ years for candidates with a doctorate, master's degree, or bachelor's degree.
Ability to reason about systems at multiple levels of abstraction, from high-level architecture to implementation details.
Strong problem-solving, analytical, and communication skills, including the ability to explain complex system behavior to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Competency or demonstrable coursework in at least one numerically focused environment, such as Python or MATLAB, including linear algebra, image processing, and/or machine learning libraries.
Competency or demonstrable coursework in at least one compiled or production language used in large-scale software systems, such as C++, C#, or Java.
Ability to travel internationally to customer sites at least 20% of the time.

Nice To Haves

Experience in semiconductor inspection, machine vision, robotics, or similar technical domains requiring hardware/software co-design.
Track record of diagnosing cross-subsystem issues spanning optics, electronics, firmware, and application software.
Experience using AI coding agents such as Copilot, Cursor, Aider, or similar tools.
Experience with Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or other software development methodologies.
Experience with version control and CI/CD practices.
Experience debugging complex multithreaded software environments.
Familiarity with embedded systems, hardware communication protocols, and/or real-time constraints.

Responsibilities

Build and continually refine a mental model of the inspection platform, including optics, motion, electronics, image acquisition, and software.
Translate customer problems and application requirements into well-scoped engineering tasks by reasoning across subsystem boundaries.
Move between system-level architecture and specific technical areas such as databases, algorithm performance, hardware, data flow, GPUs, and GUIs.
Participate in new product development with hardware engineers, application engineers, Technical Project Managers, and Program/Product Managers.
Apply machine learning, image processing, computer vision, mathematics, and optics to develop algorithms for Onto inspection platforms.
Develop or contribute to optical imaging modeling and calibration, and/or image segmentation, classification, and detection algorithms.
Write, test, and debug software; optimize software for performance, scalability, quality, and reliability.
Perform or lead requirement analysis, detailed software design, production code development, and associated test plans, depending on experience.
Participate in design and code reviews with systems engineers, software developers, and other technical staff.
Use AI coding agents to accelerate implementation while maintaining ownership of architecture decisions, design integrity, and code quality.
Stay current with academic research and industrial practices in machine vision inspection, image processing, machine learning, and AI-assisted engineering.
Document software designs, system-level rationale, development processes, and troubleshooting steps.
Support teammates and, at senior levels, provide technical mentorship, especially in systems thinking.
Contribute to improving team development workflows and tooling, including AI-assisted practices.
Travel internationally to customer sites at least 20% of the time, with additional travel as business needs require.